The oldest living World War II veteran and oldest living man in the U.S. turns 112 Friday, and his family and friends are celebrating by inviting everyone to stop by and see him. Richard Overton, born in 1906, still lives in east Austin in the house he built 72 years ago. Overton moved into the house, now on a street named after him, in 1946, and still spends his days on his front porch, smoking cigars and drinking whiskey. "I feel fine every day," Overton told a gaggle of reporters and photographers gathered outside his home on Thursday. "No pain...

On this day in 1934, Washington Senator's backup catcher Morris "Moe" Berg's streak of 117 games in a row without committing an error comes to an end, setting an American League record. Berg wasn't your typical athlete: before signing with the Brooklyn Robins (they wouldn't become the Dodgers until 1932), he graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. magna cum laude in modern languages. Ted Lyons, Berg's teammate with the White Sox, would say that "he can speak seven languages but can't hit in any of them." Berg didn't have a great bat, but when every one of manager Ray...

A British organization has launched an ambitious project aimed at restoring old, abandoned synagogues across Europe and bringing them back to community life, and commemorating communities that were wiped out in the Holocaust. The Foundation of Jewish Heritage has identified 3,300 pre-Second World War buildings used for Jewish prayer, of which at least 19 could be brought back into use - out of an estimated total of 17,000 that were in use before the Second World War. The remaining buildings, of which just 718 are still being used as synagogues, have been carefully catalogued based on their artistic, urban, and...

South Korean President Moon Jae-in urged Tokyo on Thursday to act on the basis of remorse and reconciliation when managing bilateral ties and acknowledge the historical truth about women forced to provide sex for Japanese troops before and during World War II. Amid tension between Seoul and Tokyo over the future of a 2015 bilateral agreement on the “comfort women” issue, Moon described the women’s treatment as an inhumane crime and said that Japan, “the perpetrator, must not declare (that the issue) is over.” Moon made the remarks in a speech at an annual ceremony commemorating a movement for Korean...

Teaching history has never been easy in Russia, where archives are closed and transparent discussions about the country’s Soviet past are met with hostility. Even then, teaching World War II is more difficult: with every year that Putin is in power, Russia fails to confront its role in the war head on. In September 2016, three history textbooks were sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, all of which gloss over Stalin’s crimes and his initial alliance with Nazi Germany. “My main issue with the textbooks is that they do not reveal the whole truth,” says historian and teacher Leonid Katsva....

The Red Army's defeat of Nazi German forces on Polish soil in 1944-1945 remains a thorny issue in Russian-Polish relations. Many Poles viewed the Red Army as an occupation force, not as liberators, as the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact had carved up Poland between two dictatorships. Poland updated its "de-communisation" legislation, banning "totalitarian" symbols, which would include Soviet propaganda monuments. The Russian foreign ministry condemned the new Polish "de-communisation" law as "an outrageous provocation", and warned of unspecified "consequences". "The USSR paid the highest price to liberate Poland - on that country's soil, in battles with the enemy, more than 600,000...

A startling new documentary will reveal never-before-seen evidence about a plot by a group of death camp survivors to poison millions of Germans in vengeance for the Holocaust. The film – “Holocaust: The Revenge Plot” – revolves around tapes of a Jewish resistance fighter named Abba Kovner who carefully detailed his recollections of the plan. The tapes were recorded in 1985 when Kovner was dying from cancer and tell of the 1946 plans to poison the water supplies in several German cities.

The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts. The variety of character among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behaviour. Beria and Stalin, back...

"Heroes are not to be criticized..." The official Soviet narrative of the Second World War used the concept of heroism to imbue war commemoration with an obligation towards the State. Such a concept was designed to make subsequent generations feel inferior to their predecessors and obliged to give of their best. Today, the victory serves as the strongest connection between Soviet and modern Russian patriotism. The paper argues that the memory of the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) as treated in museums in St Petersburg today is an appropriation by present-day Russian propaganda of the Soviet narrative. Soviet memorial sites are...

Germany's Constitutional Court has ruled that a 96-year-old German must go to jail over his role in mass murders committed at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz during World War Two, refusing to overturn a lower court ruling. Oskar Groening, known as the "bookkeeper of Auschwitz" for his job counting cash taken from the camp's victims, was sentenced to four years' jail in 2015, but wrangling over his health and age have delayed the start of his sentence. The Constitutional Court rejected the argument by Groening's lawyers that imprisonment at his advanced age would violate his right to life, adding...

A tent riddled with Nazi bullets, bikinis on parade and a spaniel in a life jacket: Colourized WW2 images reveal what life was like for troops when they weren't fighting on the front lineFascinating colourised photos have revealed what life was like for Second World War troops when they weren't fighting on the front line. Images, transformed from black and whites by a design expert, show troops taking a break in a hospital tent riddled with bullet holes from a long range Nazi gun in Sicily. They also show a serviceman standing to attention next to a line-up of bikini-clad...

The classic World War II film Casablanca premiered 75 years ago. It starred Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, and it told a story of romance, intrigue and sacrifice. It was also passionately anti-Nazi — but not for the Germans who first got to see it. Casablanca was released in the U.S. in 1942, in the middle of World War II, but it wasn't released in Germany until 1952, after the war was over. For that German version, Warner Bros. deleted all scenes with Nazis in them, and almost all mention of the war. It became a completely different story —...

Wrecks of Japanese and U.S. warships — including first American vessel to fire shot in WWII — found off PhilippinesThe sunken remains of five Japanese and two U.S. warships — including the vessel that fired the first American shot of World War II — have been found off the Philippines, a team of deep sea explorers funded by billionaire Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen have announced. Released earlier this week, ahead of the anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, underwater footage shows one of the ships is the USS Ward, the destroyer that fired...

Striking images of fighter planes and bombs used during the Second World War have been brought into the twenty-first century after being expertly colourised. The vivid colour images show crashed aircraft engulfed in flames, captured Nazi prototype planes, and military troops working to get jets and bombs into working condition.

The ghosts of thousands of long-forgotten villages haunt Britain, inhabitations suddenly deserted and left to ruin. As a new campaign begins to shed further light on these forgotten histories, the Magazine asks - what happened and why?Albert Nash, blacksmith for 44 years in the village of Imber, Wiltshire, was found by his wife Martha slumped over the anvil in his forge. He was, in her words, crying like a baby. It was the beginning of November 1943, a day or two after Mr Nash and the rest of the villagers had been told by the War Office they had 47...

The remains of a World War II Marine who was killed in the South Pacific arrived at San Jose International Airport Friday to be returned to his family in Gilroy. The Masoni family has waited since 1943 for Frank Masoni to return home. Masoni was a Marine cook in the South Pacific but was sent into action and killed in the battle of Tarawa. His family thought his body was never recovered until the military conducted a DNA test matching it to an unknown Marine buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. Turns out, it was...

November 15 is the anniversary of the birth of legendary German general Field Marshall Erwin (Johannes Eugen) Rommel (1891-1944), who became known as Der Wüstenfuchs ("the Desert Fox") as commander of the Afrika Korps in World War II. Born in Württemberg the son of a schoolmaster, Rommel joined the Imperial German Army in 1910 and served in France, Italy, and Romania during World War I, receiving the highest decorations for bravery. Between the wars, he rose steadily in the army hierarchy, becoming well known as a military educator and writer of textbooks during the early Nazi years. At the time...

Seventy-five years ago this month, the Soviet Red Army surrounded --and would soon destroy -- a huge invading German army at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Nearly 300,000 of Germany's best soldiers would never return home. The epic 1942-43 battle for the city saw the complete annihilation of the attacking German 6th Army. It marked the turning point of World War II. Before Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler regularly boasted on German radio as his victorious forces pressed their offensives worldwide. After Stalingrad, Hitler went quiet, brooding in his various bunkers for the rest of the war. During the horrific Battle of...

Arnie Pritchard of New Haven and his two brothers knew in a general way growing up that their mother, Marion Pritchard, had sheltered Jews in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. But it wasn’t until 1981 when they were well into adulthood that they learned the details and scope of her heroism when their mother received the Righteous Among the Nations award from Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. It would turn out that while in her early 20s in Holland, Marion Pritchard risked her life many times over by assisting in saving some 150 Jews, mostly children, killing a man with...